


until the night is over

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Western, Australia, Bandits & Outlaws, Gen, M/M, Mentions of Prostitution, References to Drugs, colonialism is bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:01:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24970471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: The piano player is not as he seems.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	until the night is over

**Author's Note:**

> this story is essentially fanfiction of my own characters who originate from [this series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/734235).

When the door creaked open in the middle of the night, Lockett had his gun in his hand before he was even all the way awake. But it was only the piano player from downstairs in the bar. He was carrying a guttering lantern and he looked like he often went places with a loaded gun pointed at him. One would have to be pretty unflappable to be a saloon musician all the way out here. Lockett put the gun back over on the side table, careful to make sure it was still within reach, and the piano player closed the door behind him. 

Lockett was pretty sure he knew what this was about, but it was still worth asking. “What’re you doing here.” 

The piano player shrugged. This was all a very carefully choreographed dance. He sat on the edge of the rough straw mattress so that they were not touching but could have been easily if they wanted to. “Your friend said you could use some company.” 

Lockett bristled. It wasn’t so much that Montclair didn’t know him well as that Montclair knew him so well that he understood innately what he could do to make Lockett the most uncomfortable. “He did?” 

“He did more than say,” said the piano player. He took a few coins out of the front pocket of his shirt and showed them to Lockett. Then he put them back. 

So there was going to be no getting rid of him. “I was asleep,” Lockett said. “Been riding all day.” He’d also put a substantial quantity of laudanum in his last glass of whiskey. This is what you were having to do, riding all the time, hurting all the time, inside and out hurting just about everything you did. “You want to sleep?” 

It wasn’t what he had been expecting but the piano player said, “Sure.” 

“Get your kit off and get in,” Lockett said, lying down, curling up again. It was really a bone-deep pleasure to sleep in a bed, even a bed like this one at the low end of what could be called a bed, when you usually slept on the cold ground. “And put the light out.” 

The piano player was layering his ragged clothing with gentleness and precision unbefitting a sane human being in these territories on the collapsing rocking chair by the window. Evidently the clothes had once been pretty fine judging by the cut of them but they were faded and bleached with sun and stained here and there and they bore razor-thin tears about the seams. Underneath them was a hungry and pale person with a lot of bones and shadows. He turned across the room toward Lockett and Lockett looked away. Next thing the light went out and the bed dipped and somebody else’s creaky body hit the creaky bed in a series of squirming shuffling sighs, and Lockett felt another spine brush his, cogs turning against another distinct gear, warm skin, breathing; there were shouts in the street, then a gunshot, then they were both asleep. 

\--

In the morning there was somebody clinging to him like morning glory suffocates a tree. At first he groped for his gun on the side table and then he remembered the nocturnal arrival of the piano playing whore. What a fucking conceit. The dawn light was cold through the frosted glass windowpanes and Lockett’s nose was cold and he was about an hour from fixing pretty bad but at least it was warm. Quiet, still. This other person breathing against his chest, only his hair much visible amidst the piles of wool blankets. 

He didn’t particularly want to, but he extricated himself and got dressed, splashed his face at the basin on the dresser, sat on the floor in a shaft of light to clean his gun. Eventually he got up and went to his saddlebags on the side table to get out the dark green glass bottle of laudanum and take a couple drops and it was in process of putting the bottle back again that the piano player stirred and blindly felt across the bed and made a nearly inaudible missing sound so that Lockett, god help him, said, “I’m right here.” 

The piano player blinked his eyes open. There was some crud in the corners of them. Lockett had not previously noticed that they were a soft and light brown, like a fawn or something. “Oh,” the piano player said. 

“You can sleep more if you want,” Lockett said. “You can stay here all day. I’ve got to take care of some things.” 

“What kind of things?” 

“Ha ha,” said Lockett. 

\--

When he got back it was dark. Montclair was in the bar and the piano player was at the piano and with him was a native girl playing the fiddle, doing some nice folksy tune from old Ireland. Lockett had had some drops outside and he felt like the inside of himself was clean and nothing could smudge it. He went to the bar and asked for whiskey. 

Montclair came over. “Is it done,” he said. 

“It’s done.” 

And it had been done easy. The goods were in the old barn down by the dry lake where they staged them. As for the dead, they had used to just set the houses on fire, but they were older now and with their wits somewhat more about them. By now he was expert at digging shallow graves in the thin strange soil of this godforsaken place. Montclair had never liked to work with his hands. 

Lockett realized he was watching into the tarnished mirror that ringed the room only when the piano player looked up into it and their eyes met in the warped reflection. The piano player closed one eye. It was a wink, Lockett realized belatedly; he, Lockett Schaff, had been winked at. Some kind of hot chill twisted around his spine like a cat but, somewhat pathetically, all he managed to do was nod, by which time the piano player had looked back down toward the keys. 

“Did you have a good night,” Montclair asked him, clearly having noticed this entire exchange. 

“I slept like a baby,” Lockett said. 

\--

It happened again, though this time he was lying awake, watching the low moon in the window. The door creaked; he knew who it was, by the same instinct by which he went for the gun on the nightstand and said, “What are you doing here?” 

“Jesus, what do you think? Come on.” 

Lockett practically threw the gun on the side table. “I’m going to kill Montclair,” he said. 

“Yeah, I think you should,” said the piano player, shutting the door quietly behind himself. “He’s an evil man. But he didn’t tell me to come this time.” 

Lockett was surprised, and he might have been angry, were it not for the dose he'd taken before bed; tellingly, more at the first part than the second. “I owe him my life,” he said. 

The piano player sat on the edge of the bed and started taking his boots off. “If we had to love everybody we owed our lives to…” He shook his head. “It would be a very different world.” 

“You’ve never had a debt you felt you couldn’t pay?” 

The piano player got his jacket off and hung it on the bedpost, then he started on the mismatched buttons of his shirt. In the moon through the window there was a colorlessness about him that made him seem like a character from a story. “I have,” he said. “To the guy who owns this place. The thing is I've paid it about a million times over but in his eyes it’ll never be finished.” 

“You assume it’s the same for me.” 

“I know it’s the same for you because I know Montclair.” 

“You just met him.” 

“Who says I have?” 

When he had gotten undressed down to his long johns the piano player tried to lift the blankets to let the least amount of cold air in and then he got under them all clumsily rubbing the goosebumps off his arms. He turned over on his side and stared at the back of Lockett’s neck with this palpable yearning stare so that eventually Lockett turned over on his back. “What’s your name?” he asked. 

“Graeme. I know that you’re called Schaff.” 

“You can call me Lockett.” 

“Lockett,” Graeme said. “Like a necklace?” 

He sighed. “I guess so.” 

“People must say that to you all the time.” 

They actually didn’t, because Lockett was not in the habit of telling anyone his first name. Sometimes he didn’t even tell them his last name. He had not very much intended to construct a mythology around his person; it had just happened, on account of his extreme unforthcomingness. He didn't usually talk to whores this much. He didn’t usually talk to whores at all. They were usually girls, and they usually didn’t talk much either. When he asked their names, he knew that they were lying too. They all said they were called Mary, like that was the kind of thing they thought men wanted to hear due to its association with the Virgin. It made Lockett think about his mother, who was also called Mary and who had revered the Virgin. He remembered her these days only in sketches. She was like a sunset cloud upon the sea. 

“Do you just want to sleep again,” Graeme asked him. 

“Yeah. Sure.” 

His face did a funny twist. This was not an arena in which Lockett was accustomed to disappointing people. “I can get one of the girls for you if — ” 

“No, that’s not it. We can sleep. I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t be sorry. Why are you sorry?” 

Lockett turned onto his side again. He didn’t really know why, only that he was. He felt Graeme looking at the back of his neck again. He felt himself make the conscious choice to forgo the vigilance. It was hard to take it off, like a suit of armor or something. 

“Where do you usually sleep,” Lockett asked. 

“Hm,” Graeme said. His voice was so soft that Lockett could tell his eyes were closed. “I have a pallet in the basement.” 

“This is better?” 

“A hundred thousand times better.” 

\--

In the night, that dream came back. It was the classic bloody dream of the old prison hulk. It had been a year or so since he'd had it and he thought he was rid of it, but you could never be rid of some things. It was like a scar or a tattoo on your back, both of which he also had, and which could only be seen and remembered sometimes, in a mirror or a reflection in still water, or when something twinged, or when someone said something, or by some other ineluctable mystery. Such was the nature of a dream. It was so hot in there that sometimes you couldn’t breathe for the smell of things — people — rotting. The despair was immersive. It was an ambient condition. He would have done anything just to be able to throw himself overboard, but it would have been hard to drown in the silted shallow harbor with all the guards on deck. Death was another untenable escape for them. Perhaps a worse one, because after you were dead there was no way they would get you back. Anyway, it was only two years there, for thievery; sometimes it felt like a lifetime, otherwise like the blink of an eye, except in the dream, where time stretched out, time was like a drunk woman knitting, stretching slipping loops, the same horror playing over and over again, the same horror and all the other horrors woven tightly together all at once into a great abstract tapestry of viscera, maggots… A great white everything-nothingness. He was stuck down there whilst it crowded over him, the shapeless colorless mass of it, shoving him back into the corner of his mind, and then all of a sudden it began to lift, like a cloud. It took him an embarrassingly long time to realize it was because he was waking up. It dispersed like mist and the real world faded in from the burning fog. The room was warm and dark and the cicadas were going outside and there was someone’s arm wound tightly across his chest.

“Are you awake now,” Graeme said sleepily. Lockett could feel his voice inside his chest through his own spine and ribs. He couldn’t quite speak yet so he just nodded. Graeme said, “You were having a bad dream.” 

\--

This was the story: when he had gotten out of that place, it had taken a while for all the normal human feelings to come back on. When they did, he was halfway into the desert. He supposed he was seventeen. Everything hurt. He didn’t really remember what he had been doing. He knew he had spent all the money that had been in his pockets from before buying drink and opium. So now there was really nothing, nothing to do and nowhere to go and no money. Then Montclair showed up. In those days he was just a scrap too. Nowadays he told people he’d been in prison and they tended to believe it but Lockett knew he hadn’t been, it wasn’t true, because Montclair had told him as such then. He had money and he paid the saloonkeeper to bring a meal out for Lockett and paid extra when she initially refused because Lockett had been hanging around begging for three maybe four days. He had drops too. He said, what was it like in there? Basically like a little boy asking his older brother about fucking, except they were of an age. I don’t remember, Lockett told him, it is antithetical to memory. It is the black hole sucking drain of memory. That was another person who experienced that thing, and it was another person before, and now, after it all, I’m a kind of diminished third. These days it could nearly all be contained inside his singular body (the laudanum helped) but it had been a right trial then. In the reflection, nothing would look back at you. 

There was no reason for that place except to get bled. It was like a great leech. You kept bleeding even when you got it off you. Even afterward, you had to try really hard to keep from losing everything. Because nothing and nobody would give you a job after, and because odds were you had a burning thirst for revenge and a general air of desensitization to violence, being an outlaw was just about it. Montclair knew this. He was an angry boy whose mother had loved him very much; she was dead now, and he had all the proceeds from the sale of her estate and some grand ideas, and he was looking for lieutenants. 

Nothing else to do but die. He knew he owed Montclair a great debt which could never be entirely forgiven. He would’ve known this even if Montclair hadn’t harped on it all the time. Most of the time it could be ignored. He did the work with his hands as he had always done. 

\--

He thought he wouldn’t sleep again but somehow he did. When he woke up, Graeme was standing in the window, looking out through the rainwater-stained curtains upon the early day with a calculating kind of expression. He was wearing long johns and that was it so that Lockett saw a pitted scar on his left shoulder indicating that at one time not so very long ago he had been shot. It was a messy bad scar against all the rest of his nice skin such that probably somebody had taken gunpowder to it in the bush against infection. Something else to add to the mental compendium of bizarre information about this strange person. 

Lockett had been thinking he had to have come from money and money around here mostly came from the law. Otherwise maybe his family were hoteliers or railroaders or they worked a cattle station. Someone must have carefully taught him to play piano in some grand lovely room. It had not yet been illuminated exactly what would drag such a person out here. Maybe it was love. Otherwise it was drugs. Thirdly, Lockett knew that there were some people who had to see and do a bad thing just to prove they could. And after all that it was easy enough to wind up selling the easiest thing there was to sell. 

It did not do to dwell on it for very long. Whatever brought anybody here? It was some or another kind of desperation, over and over again. He got up, got dressed, cleaned his face in the cold basin. “What are you doing today,” Graeme asked him, trying to be nonchalant about it. 

“You’re funny.” 

“I’m just curious.” 

He was sitting on the bed, buttoning his shirt. 

“What are _you_ doing today,” Lockett said. 

“I have to go meet the guy who makes the whiskey,” Graeme said. “Then I have to tune the piano.” 

“Is it out of tune?” 

Graeme looked up at him. “Yes,” he said, “badly. But you can ask me what you really want to know.” 

Lockett tried to bite his lip but it came out before he could. “What happened to your shoulder?” 

This was clearly not the question that Graeme had expected. “Somebody shot it,” he said, cocking an eyebrow. 

“Who? How?” 

“With a gun, Lockett.” 

He recognized evasive maneuvers and cursed himself for wading into this quicksand to begin with. “Was it here?” 

Graeme shook his head. “Northeast of here a couple days’ ride. The end of my previous career.” 

“Which was what?” 

“You’re full of questions this morning.” 

“So are you.” 

“I’ll tell you if you tell me,” Graeme told him. 

\--

There was not much music in their lives. Sometimes his mother and father would sing. They had a neighbor who came by with a fiddle on happy occasions, which became disappearingly rare as he got older. Sometimes the bells on the cattle over in the next selection would clang rhythmically. As a child he lay down in the tall grass and wildflowers watching the clouds moving slowly like ships under sail across the wide bright sky. The silence could possibly be imagined to have the same great reflective beauty of music, except that there was never any real silence. There were always the sounds of the land — the wind in the grass — that most people read as silence. As soon as you were aware of them, you could be certain you were never alone. In the prison, in its deepest depths, when sometimes the sound of his own breathing seemed flayingly harsh, he listened for the rhythmic movement of the sea. Sometimes he could grasp that there were beautiful and good things happening elsewhere. Sometimes this was more challenging. 

Lockett was obliged to parlay with one of Montclair’s lieutenants who was a horsethief out by Lake Mulwala. The trick was not to trust any of these men as far as you could throw them and never to get down off the horse. This guy had some unbroken stock that was rangy, ribbed like fishbones, manes unbrushed; they would’ve been good horses had anybody thought of them other than meat. Montclair would’ve taken them, he’d take anything that’d turn a profit, even if that profit was pennies, but Lockett said no. Won't you come inside and have a bit of whiskey and maybe we could work out a deal, said the horsethief, but Lockett tipped his hat and said he had better be going. 

He amused himself on the long hot ride back to town thinking about what Montclair would've said. It would’ve been something like, you’re a businessman and this is no place for businessmen. Sometimes he imagined with a savage delight what might happen if he ever dared to talk back. It had been made clear a very long time ago that even the most judicious critique was not his function as Montclair’s second. He might’ve said, if he could, something like, well, you do a lot of awful bad business. 

\--

This time when Lockett got up to his room it was late, and the cloudful sky was a deep velvet blue-black, like a bruise, and Graeme was already there, sitting on the bed in his jeans and undershirt. His feet were bare and the toe that touched the floor was bruised in a purplish gradient. Lockett realized he should have asked the night before what exactly Graeme thought he was doing now that money was apparently no longer part of the equation. Letting it fly once had unfortunately made it normal. 

He put his gun on the nightstand and got out of his belt and boots, cleaned his face at the basin and passed a damp hand through his limp hair. Graeme was just watching him in silence, which was auspicious enough that Lockett took his damn time to the extreme to avoid having to face whatever this was going to be. It was going to be nothing good, he could tell already, and the old snake low in his belly had set to twisting about it. Indeed, no sooner had he sat down on the bed than Graeme sidled as close to him as he had heretofore dared and said, “Let me do something for you.” 

He wasn't talking about no kind of neighborly favor. “I don’t need you to do anything for me,” Lockett said. 

“But do you want me to?” 

God damn if he was not accustomed to being asked this many questions. “I don’t know,” he said finally. It wasn’t really an answer but it was all he could think of, and he thought it was probably true. 

In the buttery golden lanternlight Graeme’s face was close and careful. It had been shaped by a very thoughtful hand. He smelled like sweat and ashes and the high vanilla note of whiskey, and it was cold enough in the room — certainly this was by design — that his nipples were visible against the thin fabric of his undershirt. Just kick him out, said the fearful thing which did not possess Lockett’s mind hardly at all these days except in these sorts of circumstances. He had not been one to heed the urgings of that thing for many years now and yet he wanted to so very badly that he almost felt like a child again. 

“When you think about… being with another person, what do you think of,” Graeme said. 

“I don’t think of that at all.” 

“Everyone thinks of it.” 

“Not me.” 

“Whatever it is, you can tell me,” Graeme said. “It won’t scare me.” 

It was his whole job to be gentle, Lockett thought, looking at him. To be very gentle and very patient without expectation of equivalent return. In fact with pretty assured expectation that the return would be outsized in the other direction. “It _is_ frightening you,” Lockett told him, “I can see. To think that a person could — be content without… that.” 

“But are you content?” 

“Not for lack of — ” 

He put the heels of his hands into his eyes. 

“You strike me as a very lonely person,” Graeme said. 

“I think maybe you know as well as me that loneliness is a condition unfulfilled by the carnal act alone.” 

“I do know,” Graeme said. “I’m a very lonely person too.” 

Now Lockett understood what he was trying to do. “We’re not the same,” he said. 

“What?” 

“I think you see a kind of funny mirror here,” Lockett said, tracing between them where it would be with the flat of his hand. “But there isn’t one.” 

“What are you insinuating?” 

“I won’t analyze you. I’m not a doctor.” 

“You carry enough laudanum around to be a doctor,” Graeme said bitterly. 

“You drink enough to be a fish.” 

Downstairs someone laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and then abruptly stopped. 

“So we’re even,” Graeme said. 

“We’re even.” 

“I just don’t understand why you won’t — ”

“I just want to sleep,” Lockett told him. He was surprised by the force in his own voice. “Will you just sleep with me?” 

Graeme’s face shifted and changed. Either he finally understood or he had decided he probably ought to pretend he did. “Yes,” he said, “of course.” 

On the edge of it, the great, dark, warm, yawning precipice beyond which was all remaining mystery, he felt Graeme’s open hand against his back, and then around his ribs, and then in a fist of his shirt against his heartbeat, and he understood that they went into the same dream. 

\--

[ He woke up half in the river, which was licking brackish mud hideously into his mouth. He had been drinking from this river and assorted country wells in its floodplain all his life and had never before tasted it brackish. When he sat up he realized the salt was from all the blood. Some of it was his own, but it hurt too bad to even feel it. He knew it was in his back from how he couldn't stand to raise his head or lift his arm. The rest of it belonged to the other bodies which were floating presently face-down in the mumbling eddys and drifting ever toward the southern ocean. One was a man’s body and one was a mule’s body. The other mule was laboring in the dust still tied in to their old wagon on the back of which was the piano and nothing else because everything else was gone. 

He got out of the river and tried to calm the surviving mule and then had to put it out of its misery with a heavy rock to the back of the skull because it had been shot in the gut. He got the dead man out of the water and sat him under a tree and got the sodden maps and traveling papers out of the pockets of his jacket. He wanted to bury him and tried but he had to dig with his hands and the dust wouldn't go. Dust kept flowing back in to fill where dust went away. Had been crying for so long could not feel it anymore. At last walked upstream to drink away from the blood. Walked upstream until he couldn't walk anymore and a police sergeant found him in the dust in the morning and thought him first to be dead then to be drunk. If you looked native or Irish they would arrest you for just about anything, including being dead, especially being drunk, so that when he woke up in several days’ time with the wound in his shoulder having been burnt out against fever by a drunken surgeon it was in some squalid prison shed in some squalid police camp and the rain was coming in through the windows and streaming down the walls. He was eventually released in exchange for the information he gave, which had been an elaborate fiction. By this time riders had been dispatched from town after the piano and the bodies. ] 

\--

In the morning, Montclair was outside the saloon pacing in the dust. Lockett’s head hurt. He was planning on taking the drops when he got outside but it wouldn’t do to take them in front of Montclair, who already had enough to say about his hopheadish tendencies. Somehow, it immediately got worse: “You said the guns were at the old barn,” Montclair said when he saw Lockett in the door. 

“They are at the old barn.”

“No they’re not. I just came from there.” 

Fucking hell. “Somebody must’ve taken them,” said Lockett. 

Montclair spat tobacco juice in a brown spatter at Lockett’s feet. “Really?” 

“What else could’ve happened to them, Bill,” Lockett said, bracing himself for whatever lecture on his incompetence was to come. 

“You expect me to believe that?” Montclair was watching his face with those brutal bloodshot eyes. “Nobody else knows about that place, do they?” 

Lockett tightened his jaw so it wouldn’t drop. He wondered if the coca wine Montclair had gotten was bad somehow and had somehow ratcheted up his already endemic paranoia. “What would I do with them? You think I know any buyers who aren’t your people?” 

“You’re always… ingratiating yourself,” Montclair noted. He seemed to have been thinking about this for a long time. “Everywhere we go.” 

Lockett brushed his boot over the print of Montclair's tobacco spit in the dust. He’d long since learned there was no point to letting himself be goaded. “I’ll ride out now and find them,” he said. 

Montclair spat again. It hit the toe of Lockett’s boot this time. “You’ve been cozy with your little friend,” he said. Lockett clasped his own hands together behind his back so tightly that he could feel the bones shifting under his skin. “Do you know who he is?” 

“What?” 

Montclair took a step closer, so that Lockett could feel the hot breath across his face. “You want to know what I think?” 

“Not particularly!” Lockett said. “Bill, I want to just go find the goddamn guns and forget about it, why is that so fucking difficult?” 

“Should be easy finding considering it was you took them in the first place!” 

“Jesus,” Lockett said. Over the charade of performative betrayal, he shouldered past Montclair in the dust, nothing he hadn’t done before, except that Montclair grabbed him by the fabric of his shirt, then slung an elbow around his neck, and they fell in the street like drunks and rolled, scrabbling at each other’s clothes, landing glancing punches and scraping with fingernails like cats. It had been a long time since they had fought each other like this. Lockett had thought, probably wishfully, that they’d gotten it all out when they were young, when the slightest thing would have them at each other. It was a vengeful and childish kind of fighting to this day and it came from the same insecure youthful place wherein everything was perceived as a personal slight. Montclair had never quite grown out of that, Lockett considered, as a big rough hand fastened around his throat. 

He felt like a fish on a hook. Twisting, sputtering. The heel of his hand met Montclair’s jaw and scrabbled upward but the grip at his neck only tightened. There were yellow spots then black. Everything started growing grayer and grayer like there was some great storm coming in from the coast to sit and rumble over the desert for hours without shedding a single tear. Holy hell, Lockett thought, with a surprising clarity, considering, it might really end like this. 

All of a sudden, several things happened at once. First he thought he heard a very light or distant bell; later he realized this was the sound of glass breaking. Then there was a great crack, and then everything stopped. Montclair just stopped. Lockett wrenched the grip from his throat. Whatever beating was going to come next he knew wouldn’t feel because of the extreme violence of oxygen repossessing his entire body. But nothing came, so, for a time, Lockett entertained the notion that he was dead. The sky was almost too bright blue to be real and his ears were ringing. He waited for a few minutes to be sure and the next thing he knew there was a great weight lifted off him, though he could not exactly be sure whether this weight was literal, and a familiar face loomed worriedly into his view. “You,” he said. 

“Me,” Graeme agreed. “Are you alright? Did I hit you?” 

Lockett sat up. In process of doing so he noticed there was blood all over him. “Oh, fuck,” he said. 

“I don’t think it’s yours,” Graeme said apologetically. 

Montclair was lying next to them in the dirt. The blowing dust was already gumming up his open eyes and the wound at his temple through which had burst a substantial quality of his blood and brains. 

“Holy hell,” said Lockett. 

“Not a bad shot,” said Graeme, standing. “Help me get rid of him?” 

He had to help Lockett get up. It still hurt to breathe, and everything was spinning, so he bent double. Either his nose was bleeding or there was enough of Montclair's blood on his face and in his hair to drip off of him to imprint little craters in the dust. “The guns,” he managed. 

“I have them,” Graeme said brightly, patting his back like he was a colicky child. “There’s a cache — we use this cave. You can still make your deal.” 

That he thought this was the problem was perhaps indicative of incredible things wrong with his brain. “Are you insane?” Lockett asked. His voice was like a scraping. He looked askance toward Graeme; the sun was cluelessly haloing around his curly head. “He has lieutenants — there’ll be a bloody mob of bushrangers after you.” 

“I’ve seen to that. He won’t have any after tonight.” 

“However have you done that?” 

“Bought out the ones I could buy out,” Graeme explained, “and the rest — Alex and her family will have seen to them by now. That leaves you. We weren’t quite sure what to do about you.” 

Lockett’s face felt burning hotter than a molten star. He stood up, staggered a little, wiped a hand across his brow and it came away bloody. “Aside from — from seducing me and — following me — ” 

Graeme had folded his arms across his chest like someone’s mother about to deliver a scolding. “Please,” he said, “I did not follow you. The native people know everything that happens around here; if you don’t see them that’s your fault. And I most certainly did not _seduce_ you.” 

“Maybe not by its dictionary definition!” 

This was a weird argument to be having over a corpse. They should probably have been doing something about it, but Graeme felt the need to mount a robust self-defense. “Listen,” he said, “I like you. D’you think I would’ve slept with you three nights holding you if I didn’t like you?” 

“Yes!” 

His face clouded. “Well, I wouldn’t’ve, and I resent that you’ve gotten such an idea.” 

“You are a goddamn conniving bastard.” 

“It worked out. That’s all. I swear.” He gestured at the body in the dust. “Are you really hurt? Are you really upset?” 

“Not about that!” 

He felt quite light, at the end of the day. It was like getting let out of prison again but different. They opened the door and he went stumbling forward into the mystery. 

“You could’ve done it yourself,” Graeme observed, “but you didn’t.” 

Now that it was over, he was wondering why he hadn’t. Sometimes when the gunfire ended he looked up and around and felt real, crashing, crushing disappointment to see Montclair alive and walking toward him, poised to unload blame for something or other. “Sometimes I thought he couldn't be killed,” he said. 

“Everyone can be killed,” Graeme said. He sounded like he had been a long time convincing himself of this fact. “Maybe its worse if you have… no regard for the barest strictures of the human moral code.” 

Behind him, Lockett heard boots on the saloon boardwalk, but it was just a few of the girls. Graeme tipped his head thoughtfully in their direction. “Help me move him,” he asked Lockett again. 

Lockett had half-carried Montclair many times drunk or under influence of assorted narcotic compounds, but he was heavier under the weight of death, even with another person dragging him by the armpits. The trail of blood in the dust might’ve been alarming had Lockett not known Montclair to be wanted enough by the police that his murder might very well just blow over. It was the lieutenants he was still concerned about, despite Graeme’s lofty and probably exaggerated claims. 

“Where are we going?” 

“Over by that copse of trees there's good enough ground for it.” 

In the thin shade Lockett started digging with his knife while Graeme retraced their steps and tried valiantly to smudge as much of the blood as was possible out of the dust with the toe of his boot. It was also on his shirt and trousers and his hands where there was a little powder burn between two fingers. He crouched next to Lockett, knees cracking, and joined him shifting the dust from the deepening hole. The dust out here was like water, even as it was antithetical to water. 

“You know everybody and their mother in town saw that,” Lockett said. The girls from the saloon were on the porch tittering. “They’re still seeing it now.” 

In some places he knew the women in town would come out and watch a gunfight. He couldn’t exactly blame them because they likely had shit else to do and never got any excitement that wasn’t embroidery or a thunderstorm. 

“Nobody’s about to send for the police around here,” Graeme reminded him. “They’d find something to write up just about everybody for.” 

“You sure about that?” 

“I intend to be out of here before I can know for sure.” 

Lockett’s knife kept hitting stone, and the wind was raw as spoiled meat. He wondered where exactly Graeme intended to go, but he didn’t ask. Instead he asked the other thing he’d been thinking: “When are you gonna tell me how in hell you even knew him? Us? Any of this?” 

Graeme chewed his lips until they seemed to disappear into his face. “I didn’t think you would remember,” he said carefully, still digging. “You were fairly nodding off your horse and that was years ago.” 

“Didn’t think I would remember what,” Lockett said, stopping. It was one hell of a sinking feeling which had visited itself upon him. 

“Holding us up at the crossing on the Murray.” 

The light on the river — it was just after dawn. The little wagon stretching a long shadow-shape across the shallows. “No fucking way,” Lockett said. 

Graeme looked up with extreme delight. “You do remember!” 

“I don’t,” Lockett told him, to make it real, to keep it from coming out of the box. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.” 

“We made this deal,” Graeme explained, clapping dust from his hands, ignoring whatever expression was on Lockett’s face, which he was later sure must have been one of incredible suffering, “Wray, that's my partner, and Montclair. Gold, that’s our gold, for corn whiskey, that’s Montclair’s, and we made a trade, it was a Thursday night, out back of the inn in Killawara. Listen, I liked you then, I even said something but you had nothing — ” He passed a hand in front of his face — “nothing behind the eyes. My ma, she had the same thing with opium so I know how it is. Anyway it was a clean trade but Montclair thought — well, he knew — he could get one over on us, us being young and soft and from Melbourne so he thought, so he — you, I should say, all of you, were waiting for us, in two mornings’ time, on the north side of the Murray to get your whiskey back.” 

“And then?” 

“And then Montclair killed Wray and somebody shot me in the back. I didn’t see who — it might’ve been you.”

The guilt was like a bucket of cold water that somebody had upended directly over his head. Obviously it had been Lockett. Why else would Montclair have sent Graeme up to his room?

“I woke up and everything was gone,” Graeme went on. “Then I came here. Nothing else to do.” 

This place was a kind of generational prison, Lockett thought. After the reliable constant of insatiable colonial greed, the secondary reason white people had come to this bizarre landmass to begin with was because they had either broken the law or they loved (or feared) said law enough to enforce it. His mother had explained that empire required each party to function. Unchecked, it could and would continue repeating itself on and on and on until the end of the world. As their parents had, so to did they have nothing else to do, and so too would any of their issue, should they be unlucky enough to be born. It was outlawry or starvation. 

“You had that piano even then,” Lockett remembered. 

“Yeah, I did. Wray had a banjo, we travelled and played. Was a good cover for hawking semi-legal goods.” 

“You never were arrested?” 

“They arrested me for being shot and passed out in the dirt,” Graeme said, turning back to dig with his hands like a dog. “They didn’t have nothing to hold me on, really, other than suspicion, so they had to let me go eventually.” 

“Then — ”

“Here. Yes. Took forever to heal,” he said, “still isn’t exactly right.” 

Lockett shook his head. “How can you be so — ” 

Graeme paused in digging and looked at him, waiting, but Lockett didn’t know the word for the thing he wanted to say. “Cavalier?” Graeme suggested at last. 

“What’s that mean?” 

“It’s like indifferent but worse.” He turned back to the hole and continued scooping handfuls of dust out. “Unfeeling,” he said, “uncaring.” 

“I don’t think you’re unfeeling.”

“I could ask you the opposite question,” Graeme said. “You’ve done a lot of horrible things. Why are you being so shy about this one? You don’t even know it was you. And even if it was, you didn’t even kill me.” 

_I don’t want to have consigned you to this. I don’t want to have made this person out of whoever you were before._ “I don’t want to have hurt you,” Lockett said. 

They really had not dug the grave enough by any decent measure but Graeme got to his feet, brushing dust from his hands. “Nor I you,” he said. “Can we be even again?” 

“Even?” 

“Tit for tat.” 

Lockett sat back on his heels. “Graeme,” he said, trying to keep his tone even, “I think — I’m sure it was me that shot you. The whole reason you — because of me.” 

Graeme looked him over. He was seeking something in particular. If he found what he was looking for, Lockett couldn’t say. “Tit for tat,” he said finally. 

\--

It took them a while to arrange the body in the hole, and when they were nearly done the native girl who had played fiddle in the bar a few nights previous rode up on a big gray roan and Graeme went over to parlay with her for a few minutes before she left again. When he came back Lockett was layering the last of the dirt on top of Montclair’s face. “Do you want to say a few words or something,” Graeme said. 

While Graeme had been talking to the girl, Lockett had been thinking the words he probably would have said had he been a different kind of person. “Not particularly,” he said. 

“Alright.” 

“Are you leaving?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Want me to come with you?” 

Graeme waited until Lockett looked him in the eyes. Then he said, “Yeah.” 

“Where are we going?” 

“I thought I might go to the Swan River.” 

“Across the bloody continent?” 

“You don’t have to come,” said Graeme. 

“I know,” said Lockett. 

He went by the barn where a local family had let him quarter his pony. He got everything important — maps, traveling papers, dried fruit and jerky — out of the leather wallets in the saddlebags and told them to keep the rest. 

“You sure?” said the daughter, who was maybe twelve years old, in boys’ clothes and braids, sweeping the makeshift stalls out. 

“No,” Lockett told her. His voice was sounding like it was coming from someplace new inside his body. “I might be back in a couple days. But I can give you my mark on a piece of paper if the police are gonna trouble you for a bill of sale.” 

They went in the kitchen and Lockett tipped his hat at her drunken father while the little girl wrote out some chicken scratch and Lockett put his big LS on it. He shook her hand and then he went back toward the saloon. Graeme was coming down the street with a satchel and when he saw Lockett he started running. “I thought you left,” he said. He was breathless and his eyes were quite bright. He had gotten most of the blood off himself except for what was deeply set into the beds of his fingernails. 

“Why would I — ” Lockett stopped when he realized it was a silly question. “Which way are we going?” 

“West.” 

They walked off together into the mystery. After long enough they could no longer be seen. 

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> this story is named after [the song by timber timbre](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SiJUDo5cEM). vaguely based on all the [bushranger stories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushranger) i've been reading lately. please feel free to correct me on anything i've gotten wrong. 
> 
> this story is dedicated to a future reality in which there are no prisons and no police. if you enjoyed it please join me in supporting [black and pink](https://www.blackandpink.org/).


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